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I know. Just what everyone needed, an episode about an election. To take a break from reading and watching election postmortems, I decided to return to one of my favorite teaching texts, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. This is more of a personal memoir of what Jocelin saw and experienced as a monk than it is the standard monastic chronicle. It contains the fullest account of the process by which English monasteries in the High Middle Ages elected an abbot, and I thought that would be a fun and a far less stressful subject than our recent election—at least for our listeners if not for the monks of Bury St. Edmunds in 1182. My co-host for this episode is my partner for life and inspiration for all things medieval, my wife Ellen. This episode is especially for those of our listening audience who regard the U.S. election results with fear and trembling and a sickness unto death.

[This is a corrected version of the episode. The first posting had some glitches which I corrected. Sorry about that.]

Quotations are from
Jocelin of Brakelond, Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, trans. Diane Greenway and Jane Sayers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

This episodes includes a musical interlude:
Orbita Solaris (Short Version) Gregorian Chant
Chant group Psallentes, directed by Hendrik Vanden Abeele, singing from a 12th century antiphoner, prepared for the Mariakerk in Utrecht. Semi-live recording by Jo Cops at Heverlee, Belgium, May 2009. Singers are: Conor Biggs, Pieter Coene, Lieven Deroo, Paul Schils, Philippe Souvagie and Hendrik Vanden. Abeele.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo-yb-UDBHA

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

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This episode is devoted to a truly unique and pretty weird Arabic text, The Book of Charlatans by an obscure early thirteenth-century Arabic scholar, Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, commonly known simply as al-Jawbari. At the behest of a Turkman sultan, al-Jawbari composed an encyclopedic guide to the scams, con games, and trickery practiced in the cities of the medieval Middle East. Al-Jawbari not only catalogues the various scams and trickery but also explains how they were pulled off. The book warns its readers to be vigilant against these scams, but it also reads like a "how to" manual. What makes it such a "good read" are the many anecdotes that al-Jawbari includes based on his own experiences during his travels throughout the Islamic east. My co-host for this episode is Peter Konieczny, the owner of the website medievalists.net, the leading online platform for all things medieval. In an earlier episode, Peter explained to me how and why the Mongols devastated Abbasid Baghdad. Frankly, I had not even heard of The Book of Charlatans until Peter approached me with the idea of doing an episode on it. I am so glad that he did because this really is an interesting work that sheds light on the criminal underbelly of the medieval Islamic world. It is also just fun. Please join us as we talk about the many scams practiced by medieval Muslim--and Christian--con artists in the thirteenth-century Middle East.

The Book of Charlatans, translated by Humphrey Davies and edited by Manuela Dengler. New York Univesity Press, 2020.

(If you have questions about this--or any episode of the podcast--feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com.)

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

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In this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with the crusades, the most recent of which is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press, 2024). We examine the roles played by religious zeal, the promise of remission of sin, feudal obligation, the hope of material gain, and the benefit of temporal privileges in motivating those who took the cross. In considering the relationship between crusaders and settlers, Steve explains why the rulers and European residents of Outremer developed a culture of religious and ethnic toleration that surprised and appalled Crusaders just off the boat. And because I couldn't resist, I have Steve explain why the Crusader States became hotbeds of crime and violence. I hope you will join us.

Audio clips in this episode:
The movie trailer for the 1948 re-release of Cecil B. DeMille's 1935 epic, The Crusades.
A snippet from "The Crusades" episode of the 1989 PBS series "Timeline."

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com